Challenges to Global Reproductive Rights
Global reproductive rights are under attack. Poland’s ongoing abortion protests have drawn attention to the struggle women face to access a fundamental human right, as classified by the UN Human Rights Committee. But, this threat to reproductive rights doesn’t end in Poland. Around the world, countries are challenging existing legal protections for abortion and furthering already harsh restrictions.
In the case of Poland, recent outrage arose after its constitutional court ruled that abortion, in practically all cases, was unconstitutional. Even though Poland already has among Europe’s toughest laws on pregnancy terminations, the court chose to favour with the country’s powerful Catholic church in making legal abortions virtually impossible. The ruling specifically restricts terminations due to foetal defects, which makes up for 98% of the legal abortions in Poland last year. Under the ruling, abortions will become near entirely banned – only permissible in the extreme cases of rape, incest, or provable threat to the women’s life. This tighter law is unlikely to reduce the number of abortions Polish women have, but it will reduce the possibility of safe, accessible, and legal abortions. Further, this law will disproportionately hurt impoverished women, who are unable to travel to another country or find alternative means to receive an abortion.
The mass protests within Poland, and supporting protests around the world, demonstrate the anger people feel in response to such unjust policies. While the scale of these protests – with nearly 100,000 gathering nightly in Poland – is powerful and moving, the reality that women still have to fight against draconian abortion laws is disheartening.
Poland’s ruling coincides with its signing of the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which broadly challenges the right to an abortion. The declaration focuses on the ‘essential priority of protecting the right to life’, which entails that signing countries commit to a universal mission of restricting abortions. Worryingly, this commitment is vague and could result in varying degrees of changes to abortion laws.
For example, one of the co-sponsoring nations was Hungary. Under Prime Minister Orbán’s administration, Hungary has become increasingly conservative and representative of ‘traditional values’. While Hungary was also criticised by the United Nations and World Health Organisation for its mandatory counselling and waiting periods for abortions, the Geneva declaration threatens to further restrict women’s reproductive rights. Without specific guidelines from the declaration, and commitments on behalf of the government, activists worry that laws may be modified in insidious ways. Hungary has already attached a ‘no-abortion’ condition to its financial support of certain hospitals, which suggests that the country is beginning to restrict abortions in less overt ways than Poland’s total ban.
The bill was co-sponsored by a group of largely repressive governments; alongside Hungary were Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Uganda, and ironically, the United States. It is surprising to see a global leader co-operate with human rights-abusing countries to develop a humanitarian policy; however, recent political occurrences suggest that the US is regressing in its abortion protections. At the end of October, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the US Supreme Court, as Donald Trump’s nomination. Barrett has a long history of denouncing reproductive rights, from signing a ‘right to life’ ad, to speaking in professional talks about her own convictions that life begins at conception. As a result, many Americans fear the prospect of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision protecting abortions, becoming overturned. With the Supreme Court now having a strong conservative majority, and Barrett having explicitly criticised Roe v. Wade, women’s rights activists have spoken to the real and emerging threat to reproductive rights in America. Julie Rikelman, the senior director of US litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights, states, “At every level of the Federal Court, we now have judges and justices who do not support the right to abortion and so the basic federal constitutional right is in jeopardy in a way that it hasn't been for decades.” Furthermore, experts agree that an overturning of Roe v. Wade would tangibly devastate abortion protections across states. Mary Ziegler, author of Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the present, explains, “we already know there are 21 states that would ban abortion outright if given the opportunity to do so.” Accordingly, the United States faces an uncertain future for its reproductive rights, and millions of women will potentially be harmed by the Supreme Court’s new political makeup.
More needs to be done on the international stage to protect women’s reproductive rights. While international institutions may, in the abstract, classify abortions as a fundamental human right, they must take action to preserve abortion access and re-affirm women’s rights everywhere. Of course, this is increasingly difficult, as global powers, such as the United States, play leading roles in those institutions and simultaneously break their commitments to human rights by restricting abortion access. Nevertheless, bodily autonomy must be treated as the crucial issue it is. Abortion rights do not only implicate a women’s ability to terminate a pregnancy, but they symbolically represent a women’s right to make decisions about her body and her life. International organisations, countries, and individuals in every level of society must band together to fight for global reproductive rights and prevent these ongoing attacks from escalating any further.
Image courtesy of Zuza Gałczyńska via unsplash, © 2020 some rights reserved
